The City of Light Goes Dark

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen "randomly." Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam -- whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics -- the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today's Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Who does not love Paris? Puritans do not love Paris. Puritans hate, music, song, dance, poetry, fun and love. Today, such people are represented above all by extremist Muslim doctrinaire fundamentalists. They seem to despise women without veils; call music Satanic; regard painted images as an insult to an angry God; consider football a sin, and a restaurant serving wine as the embodiment of evil. They do not respond to a life-affirming bustle and the ideals an open, tolerant, democratic, liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian West.

When Sir Karl Popper wrote, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, his two-volume classic, The Open Society and its Enemies, he laid bare the evils of totalitarian systems, both left and right -- Communism and Fascism. He would never have guessed that soon a Third World War would be taking place between radical Islam and the West.

Last week, the City of Light went dark. In January of this year, some Islamist gunmen had attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and another had gunned down shoppers in a kosher supermarket. U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Matt Yglesias, commenting on the supermarket attack, glossed over the motives behind it: "It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris." [Emphasis added]

Two days after last week's attacks, when reporters asked Obama if he would consider additional action against The Islamic State (IS), he declined to give a straight answer. The killings, he said, were "based on a twisted ideology." As so many times before, Obama would not define what ideology -- the belief system of radical Islam, based on violent passages from the Qur'an and Hadith, and modelled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad himself.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today's Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe. At least one of last Friday's killers in Paris appears to have travelled from Syria and entered Europe through Greece.

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen "randomly." Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam -- whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics -- the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

The kosher supermarket attack was clearly anti-Semitic. Like the multitude of such attacks on Jewish schools, museums, synagogues, and individuals, it celebrated the rise of a new anti-Semitism in Europe, an anti-Semitism (often expressed through anti-Zionism) that has been carried out by the political left, hand-in-hand with Muslim radical groups.

Jews on European streets are the one people most intensely hated by many Muslims (again, not just radicals). The freedom French Jews have for a long time enjoyed (despite high levels of indigenous anti-Semitism) is an affront to Islam, in which Jews especially must be converted, rendered submissive, or killed. Unfortunately, many Europeans have gone out of their way to be helpful. Just the day before the Paris attacks, the EU had singled out Israel, as usual, to label goods to help anti-Semitic, racist Europeans hurt Palestinians and Israelis with an unjust, sanctimonious boycott.

A leader of a British Islamic educational institute writes that, "One should abstain from evil audacities such as listening to music." Another graduate speaks of the "evils of music;" calls London's Royal College of Music "satanic," and claims that music is the way in which Jews spread "the Satanic web" to corrupt young Muslims. Is it, then, surprising that a handful of fanatics gunned down more than 80 innocent young people who had gone to enjoy a rock concert in the Bataclan Theatre?

As sports (apart from archery and horseback riding) are also activities much disliked by fundamentalist imams, three jihadis, in an apparent rebuke to such games and frivolity, went to a football stadium in Paris last Friday night and, although they could not get in, they blew themselves up outside it.[1]

The Nazis hated jazz and modern art (even as they stole it), but not even they rejected all music and all art. Hitler luxuriated in the operas of Wagner and fancied himself no mean painter, even if the art world may not have agreed with him. But today's fascists care for nothing but their own increasingly expansionist beliefs.

As Hamas members have said more than once to Israelis, with whom the Europeans have more in common now than they would like to admit, the extremist Muslims will conquer in the end because "we love death more than you love life." Nothing could better sum up the bitter reality of the Paris attacks.

In a television interview on BBC News at Ten on Sunday night, a singer, Maude Hacheb, expressed her response to the killings: "If they want to break the country, they have to break young people. I think for them, music is no good, fun is no good, love is no good. So I guess it was really significant they go to the Bataclan."

Denis MacEoin, based in England, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

[1] Cricket has been condemned by a Pakistani imam as a sacrilegious "waste of time," playing chess has been compared to dipping one's hands in the blood of pigs, and ultra-conservative Muslim clerics have condemned football as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture. Saudi Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barrak has warned in a fatwa that football "played according to [accepted international rules] has caused Muslims to adopt some of the customs of the enemies of Islam, who are [preoccupied with] games and frivolity."

Comment on this item

12 Reader Comments

Menahem Lester • Nov 22, 2015 at 07:33

Dennis -- you quote that devout Moslems, jihadists etc "consider football a sin." If that's so, the thugs who appear on the Temple Mount usually to hurl rocks at the police and abuse non-Islamic visitors (G-d forbid they should pray) are not so devout. At times, they turn the area outside Al Aqsa into a football field; that's when they're not desecrating their own sanctum by accreting rocks and weaponry inside.

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Harvey • Nov 21, 2015 at 16:51

If only these weak hypocritical governments would take proper action against these fundamental anti-social Islamic nut cases and finish them off before they kill everyone who wants a normal life. The money wasted going into places like Afganistan beggars belief, it hasn't stopped this guerrilla warfare we call terrorism. Will any thing change ? I doubt it.

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Alan Canter • Nov 21, 2015 at 10:58

May I comment on your 'Jihad' warnings by referring to Jewish tradition? In the Hebrew Bible you will probably remember the story of Jacob when he was having a bit of trouble with his uncle Laban and was out on a journey with his sheep on a country lane. Two mysterious things happened to him. When he rested for the night he had a dream where ladders with angels aboard were leading from this world up to heaven. He met a figure on the road, but he didn't know who it was and they fought all night to the point of exhaustion. This was an angel of God or even God himself who revealed to him that because of this incident he was being re-named 'Isra - el', which literally means 'one who struggles with God'. His descendants were to be known in future as 'the Children of Israel'.

The significance of this story is interpreted by our Rabbis as signifying the personal struggle man has between his conscience which is wanting him to 'do good' and his innate waywardness which is tempting him not to bother behaving well, or even to choose evil. In Christianity, the same holds but there is a divine forgiveness (where there is true contrition) through the agency of God's manifestation as Jesus of Nazareth.

I have been reading that in Islam, the same exegesis of Koranic scriptures had been developed and until comparatively recently has been the majority view about the meaning of 'Jihad': the same internal personal battle to comply with God's standards, avoid temptation and 'do the right thing'. It no longer has the singular meaning of fighting with God against pagan cultures.

Unfortunately, the latest wave of 'literalist' clerics, who are doubtless experts at knowing the settled version of the Koran off by heart but are dismissive or even ignorant of the hundreds of years of Islamic debate which formed it, are teaching primitivism. At bottom, this and other examples of shallow literalist puritan thought, is the problem we have today with Islam. This must be stated over and over again, fearlessly, by teachers, statesmen, and media outlets, forcing this atavism -- despite its mainstream supporters in many Muslim countries -- onto the back foot, so that young people can wave away their would-be brainwashers.

This would not be Islamophobia; quite the opposite. In short, we cannot dismiss or try to fight off thirteen hundred years of Islamic theology, now involving 1.7 billion people, without giving encouragement to impressionable young Muslims who are ready to absorb evolving but still authentic Islamic thought, and want to put behind them the pain of the Ottoman collapse. The alternative really would be apocalyptic. (Incidentally, the same approach could apply to confront Islamic judaiophobia and racism, but since Western civilisation itself is still in the glasshouse with those ailments, I wouldn't recommend a course of stone-throwing).

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Charles Duke • Nov 21, 2015 at 06:08

Fascism is not a right wing ideology. Mussolini was attracted to the Progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, came to the USA, studied it and then returned to Italy and founded the Fascist movement. Similarly, Hitler was attracted by the seeming success of Fascism in Italy and created National Socialism - Nazi - in Germany. The liberal socialists in the USA at the time - Roosevelt Democrats - were enamored of both Fascism and National Socialism and touted them both until both movements revealed their full evil. They then decided to lie and call both Fascism and National Socialism right wing ideologies to protect themselves and their own ideology - Progressivism - from association with what had become in the public mind very evil ideologies. It is one of the most pervasive lies of the left that Communism is left wing and Fascism is right wing. Both are left wing ideologies, as is Progressivism and all these ideologies lead to the same outcome - totalitarianism. That is where the USA is headed, being led by Obama, Billary and the entire left wing establishment. People have been mis-educated about this for about 80 years and it has led to the inability of the citizenry to identify the true enemies of freedom - all left wing ideologies. They all have as their ultimate goal the complete control of the citizenry and the complete power of the elite in the name of one alleged great false cause or another.

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Dunce • Nov 20, 2015 at 16:28

I do not believe fascism is any part of the conservative right. The main feature of fascism is state control of corporations and of people rather than liberty. It is a policy of the left to smear the right with various labels that do not fit.

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steven L • Nov 20, 2015 at 13:20

Again, you need to name the enemy otherwise you cannot defend yourself. The West has systematically tried to deny Israel the right to defend herself and eliminate the enemy. Now the West needs to do what it denies to Israel. This is antisemitism. Enlightenment does not exclude stupidity and willful self-destruction...

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Ron Thompson • Nov 20, 2015 at 09:47

Denis MacEoin is absolutely right. Thanks to poor leaders and a widely inattentive populace (inattentive in depth), the General Public still has not caught up to the reality of what's going on. Heck, we still haven't realized what 9/11 was about. Bush's mantra that "Islam is peace" acted like a stupefying drug whose paralyzing effects have never subsided. There is an awareness of the bloody facts, but no adequate consciousness of the
motive or just how many Muslims share that motive even if they are nonviolent.

Mr MacEoin puts it well when he says several times ..."devout Muslims (not just radicals)". About 70 years ago, when WW II ended, so did the tradition of at least a few leaders and public intellectuals criticizing Islam, many of them substantial figures. I was particularly influenced by Winston Churchill and John Quincy Adams, but there are dozens more even if one only goes back to the late 18th century.

Journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote a remarkable piece in 1940 about the dire results she foresaw if Islam "wakes up".

And of course, Karl Popper, one of the those Central European intellectuals who knew the horrors of both Nazism and and Stalinism and who MacEoin so aptly cites.

Today's intellectuals, in depth of Consciousness if not in bare awareness, have forgotten both.

I think the combination of the collapse of that tradition of prominent-figure criticism of Islam, plus the rise of an ideological and extreme form of
multiculturalism, has produced and maintained beyond all reason, this unfortunate taboo on free discussion about the merits of Islam, no matter what
is done in its name, and no matter how many Muslims share the beliefs motivating the carnage and mayhem.

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Robert Davis • Nov 20, 2015 at 08:57

Some French papers such as Le Monde were speaking today of French defense "gaps" which will have to be fixed, but the French government is still blind to reality: it is not a problem of "gaps". In fact, there is only one, which is IMMIGRATION. Today Europe and France have simply not the power to defend the nation considering the number of Moslems they helped enter France. For example, making the entry in France so easy for the Maghreb people, requesting no visa any longer and distributing entry permits at will! With the millions of Arabs in France and elsewhere in Europe it is simply impossible to check them since the police say it takes 20 policemen to check day and night one single suspect! THE "GAP" IS SIMPLY THE NUMBERS.

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Hanna • Nov 20, 2015 at 07:21

Thank you Mr. Denis MacEoin for telling it exactly AS IT IS. A rare occurrence in today's hostile environment. For once, I have absolutely NOTHING to add (which is ALSO a rare occurrence). Your article say's it all. Thank again, and thanks Gatestone.

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David Ashton • Nov 20, 2015 at 06:56

It is quite possible to feel disdain for urban hedonism and to dislike some "modern music" or "modern art" without seeking to murder those who do not share these views. Some of the quotations from Muslims on art, games and music belong to the realm of demented cults, but then so do some actions of the "politically correct" who act as their de facto allies because they share a hate Western civilization for different reasons; the only consolation for us being the thought that these guilt-ridden "no-platform" parallel cultists would be the first victims of an ISIS-type world without orchestras, or plays, or uncensored poetry, or pictorial art, &c. They love death more than we love life, and promise only a world of living death. To be sure, most Muslims do not take this attitude, but winning these over by a dawah and jihad of our own is not a task made easier by the continual expansion and consolidation of these alien colonies in our midst.

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Clifton Dawley • Nov 20, 2015 at 06:27

This article errs in trying to make a comparison between, what I assume the author intends, American religious Puritans and Islamists. There is a huge difference between the two...a polar difference. The Puritans showed great respect for God and the pinnacle of creation...mankind. They were not the prudes or opponents of freedom that many would like to define them as. We owe a great deal in America to the thinking, writings, and ideals of the Puritans. This cannot be said of Islam. Maybe the advancing Hedonism of the West is being exposed with the bondage that it brings to its citizens...addictions, obsessions, secular materialism, crumbling families and marriages, willingness to believe lies rather than truth, and on and on. Maybe a revival of a touch of Puritanism is just what we need or we may find that we, like Israel of old, are brought under the bondage of the Philistines for forgetting the beloved Creator. I fear that the advancing Godlessness of the West may be part of the reason that secular liberalism and Islam, the Philistines of our time, have jointed hands to wipe the face of the earth from any vestige if Democratic Republics. Otherwise, thanks for the article.

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Alexa Smith • Nov 20, 2015 at 06:19

You have the wrong impression of Puritans. They did not all wear black and white, many wore coloured cloth but were encouraged not to be over the top with elaborate clothes. This is encouraged in the New Testament. They hated the paganism which England and other countries had descended to with a perverted idea about God being angry and people had to be 'good' to get to Heaven. I believe they sang the Psalms and Holy Scriptures but don't know so much about that. They taught about the freedom from sin we received from God and they were the ones who saw the importance of Israel and the Jews. This eventually meant that Oliver Cromwell and Parliament opened the door for the Jews to live in Britain again and kept alive the importance of the Jews returning home to their own Land, through a knowledge of the Scriptures.

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